Journalists need to keep talking about genocide

It’s 80 years this year since Raphael Lemkin offered us the word “genocide”. It was a word we should have known we needed, holding out as it did the necessary legal and political frame for understanding the atrocity of our time.

Yet, here in journalism, we’re still struggling with it, long after Lemkin’s work was incorporated — and legally defined — into one of the founding conventions of a United Nations still rocked by the Holocaust. Still, we recoil from the power of the word, never quite knowing how to integrate the idea into telling the stories of both what’s happening now and what happened in the not-so-distant past that continues to shape us. 

It’s a word, a concept, we need to use with caution, based on reportorial observation and analysis, not empty rhetoric, conscious of the necessary leap from intention to action that the convention seeks to capture. But it’s a word we need to be prepared to apply.

In part, we’re overwhelmed. The word seems just too big, too confronting, to slap on just another story. But it’s not that genocide is rare. It’s all too common, an “odious scourge” as the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes it. 

In part, it’s the cowardice of a false objectivity that sees the word as too political, too rhetorical, suggesting too much of a taking of sides for daily journalistic use (as, for example, ABC management seems to think.). 

In part, too, it’s about the simple lack of access: genocide happens, by and large, in the dark — and journalists reporting those killings too easily change from witnesses to victims, like the at least 79 journalists and other media workers already killed in the Israel-Gaza war. And in part, it’s poor practice, as journalists struggle to work out how to fit any mass deaths, any large-scale atrocities, into the daily news cycle that determines what and how we report as “news”.

Ducking the word demonstrates a journalism degraded by a shrugging acceptance of the “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” mantra, coupled with hesitation about the patience of audiences for a day-by-day accounting of deaths after deaths. (Although usually credited to Stalin as hard-nosed realpolitik, the saying most likely came to life as an early swipe at modern media from Weimar Germany’s leading satirical journalist Kurt Tucholsky in his ongoing writings against war, German nationalism and the rise of Nazism.)

Journalists need to sever their reporting from the dulling imperative of the news cycle if they want to lift the veil on all the atrocities that daily reporting too readily papers over.

It’s how traditional media missed the defining moments of our recognition of the concept — the Holocaust (and the Armenian genocide before that). A search through the ever-valuable Trove in the National Library demonstrates a reporting reliant on largely limited (largely British) government communiques.

Journalism’s failures in the past continue to mar reputations today. Last year, The Sydney Morning Herald finally apologized for the masthead’s support for the killers in the 1838 Myall Lakes massacre. The New York Times remains in a quandary over what to do about the 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to its Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty for his largely uncritical coverage of Ukraine’s Holodomor. 

Fortunately, plenty of journalists are trying new paths through the hard work of reporting genocides and other mass atrocities.

For the news of now, in Israel and Palestine, the journalist collective in +972 Magazine and its sister publication Local Call are bringing their “occupation” focus to the war in Gaza, using deep investigations to report ongoing atrocities in what it unflinchingly called the “second Nakba”. Its latest report is titled “Inside Israel’s Torture Camp for Gaza Detainees”. 

Myanmar journalists are using a one-foot-in, one-foot-out strategy, with reporters working undercover inside the country, collecting news about continued atrocities by the military coup leaders while the news is published outside the country, albeit to a tragically indifferent global media.

Here in Australia, in his latest book Killing for Country, David Marr adapts the literary device of the family memoir (in this case of his great-great-grandfather’s family) to tell our own story of the brutal “Native Police” Indigenous killings in 19th century Australia.

Marr’s book reminds us, too, that our very Australian dismissal of the charge of genocide is anachronistic, applying a 20th-century concept to killings of an earlier time. Marr isn’t having it, saying in an afterword titled “Family Business”: “I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by story-telling.”

The UN Convention won’t have it either, “recognising that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity”. (Australia was an early signatory of the convention but has not incorporated the crime into domestic law.)

New Yorker journalist David Grann used the “true crime” format to write about genocide in 1990s Guatemala and in the dispossession of the Osage nation in 1920s Oklahoma, demonstrating the simple greed that too often drives murderous atrocities. (The screen adaptation of his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, is in cinemas now.)

In China, our best access to reporting on the country’s large-scale mass deaths has been the work of local journalists, accessing official documents and interviewing local officials to tell the story in book form, like Tan Hecheng’s reporting on the Cultural Revolution in a single county in southern Hunan province in The Killing Wind or Yang Jisheng’s detailing of the famine and deaths of the Great Leap Forward in Tombstone. Both books (like Yang’s later book on the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down) remind us that atrocities are more often driven by state actors than the enraged spontaneity of a people.

It’s similarly so with our region’s other largely unreported mass killings in Indonesia in 1965 — there it was largely the on-the-ground legwork by John Hughes, first reporting for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor and later in his book Indonesian Upheaval, that provided any sense of the scale of the killings. Hughes won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.

It’s a frustration that so much great journalism runs up against the wall of public indifference — and the reluctance of audiences to look too deeply into the genocides of their (our) own national past. But we need to keep talking about genocide.